Rick Haglund

Last year we published our first-ever state policy recommendations. Our motivation for doing so is a sense of urgency that across the political spectrum we need a different set of policy options. Ideas not about how we can turn the clock…

For more than a decade we have argued that the strategy for producing better economic outcomes that Michigan has adopted is not smart. Basically lower taxes and smaller government as the recipe for economic growth. As lower taxes produced less…

Conventional wisdom is that people follow jobs. So the most effective talent attraction and retention strategy, once again according to conventional wisdom, is to create jobs. If conventional wisdom were right Michigan should have reversed the net outmigration of young…

In his last post about our State Policies Matters report, Rick Haglund wrote of the much more generous safety net Minnesota has compared to Michigan. I wrote on the topic in a post entitled "The safety net and employment". Both of…

What concerns me most about Michigan's politics is how much of it, on a bi-partisan basis, seems designed for the 20th Century. We seem to be having a hard time learning what made us prosperous in the past, won't in…

After the 2010 election I was asked by several publications to write about what I expected to happen to state economic policy. My basic answer was that Governor Snyder campaigned on creating Michigan 3.0 (more knowledge-based), but almost all the…

The two terrific articles on manufacturing in America I wrote about in my last post dramatically demonstrate how futile it is to try to recreate a mass middle class in a factory-based economy. Those days are gone. Factory work is…

In a recent New York Times column Harvard’s Edward Glaeser wrote: “In the long run, America will be richer than China only by having smarter citizens, and that requires the skills that come from schools and cities, not dispersed factories.”…

Insightful Rick Haglund column on AnnArbor.com. He makes the point that after the reset of Michigan state government this year the state faces a fundamental choice in where it goes from here. One path is to do more of what…